CHARACTERISTICS OF HEBREW POETRY. [Rev. George Gilfillan, born at Comrie, Perthshire, 1813. When he completed his studies he was appoint ed to the charge of the Schoolwynd Church, Dundee, gospel, poet, critic, lecturer, and miscellaneous writer, which he still (1874) retains. As a minister of the Mr. Gilfillan has earned extensive reputation in this country and America. Gifted with great energy of character, he has made his influence felt in many departments of literature, and his sympathy for all worthy aspirations made him the early friend of several men who afterwards distinguished themselves in art and His chief works are: The Gallery of Literary letters. Portraits, two series; Bards of the Bible (from which we quote); The Scottish Covenanters; The Fatherhood of God; The History of a Man; Christianity and our Bra; Alpha and Omega, sermons; Night, a poem; Prefaces to an edition of the British Ports, in 48 vols.; a Life of Scott, &c. &c.] Many thoughts find, after beating about for, natural analogies-they strain a tribute. The thought of genius precedes its image, only as the flash of the lightning, the roar of the near thunder; nay, they often seem identical. Now, the images of Scripture are peculiarly of this description. The connection between them and their wedded thoughts seems necessary. With this is closely connected the naturalness of Scripture figure. No critical reproach is more common, or more indiscriminate, than that which imputes to writers want of nature. For nature is often a conventional term. What is as natural to one man as to breathe, would be, and seems, to another the spasm of imbecile agony. Consequently, the ornate writer cannot often believe himself ornate, cannot help thinking and speaking in figure, and is astonished to hear elaboration imputed to passages which have been literally each the work of an hour. But all modern styles are more or less artificial. Their fire is in part a false fire. The spirit of those unnaturally excited ages, rendered feverish by luxuries, by stimulants, by uncertainties, by changes, and by raging speculation, has blown sevenfold their native ardour, and rendered its accurate analysis difficult. Whereas, the fire of the Hebrews-a people living on corn, water, or milk-sitting under their vine, but seldom tasting its juice-dwelling alone, and not reckoned among the nations-surrounded by customs and manners ancient and unchangeable as the mountains,-a fire fed chiefly by the aspects of their scenery, the force of their piety, the influences of their climate, the forms of their worship, and the Hebrew memories of their past-was a fire entirely natural, and the figures used come forth in quick and impetuous flow. There is scarcely any artifice or even art in their use. art went no farther than to construct a simple form of versification. The management of figures, in what numbers they should be introduced, from what objects drawn, to what length expanded, how often repeated, and how so set as to tell most powerfully, was beyond or beneath it. Enough that the ardent Hebrew bosom was never empty, that the fire was always there ready to fill every channel presented to it, and to change every object it met into its own nature. The figures of the Hebrews were very numerous. Their country, indeed, was limited in extent, and the objects it contained, consequently, rather marked than manifold. But the "mind is its own place," and from that land flowing with milk and honey, what a rich herbarium, aviary,1 menagerie, have the Bards of the Bible collected and consecrated to God! We recall not our former word, that they have ransacked creation in the sweep of their genius; for all the bold features and main elements of the world, enhanced in effect, too, by the force of enthusiasm, and shown in a light which is not of the earth, are to be found in them. Their images are never forced out, nor are they sprinkled over the page with a chariness, savouring more of poverty than of taste, but hurry forth, thick and intertangled, like sparks from the furnace. Each figure, too, proceeding as it does, not from the playful mint of fancy, but from the solemn forge of imagination, seems sanctified in its birth, an awful and holy, as well as a lovely thing. The flowers laid on God's altar have indeed been gathered in the gardens and wildernesses of earth, but the dew and the divinity of heaven are resting on every bud and blade. It seems less a human tribute than a selection from the God-like rendered back to God. We name, as a second characteristic of Hebrew poetry, its simplicity. This approaches the degree of artlessness. The Hebrew poets were, indeed, full-grown and stern men, but they united with this quality a certain childlikeness, for which, at least, in all its simpli "Aviary"-consisting of the ostrich, the eagle, the hawk, the raven, the dove, the stork, the swallow, the crane, the sparrow, the cock, the hen, the vulture, the kite, the pelican, the ossifrage, the osprey, the owl, the night-hawk, the cuckoo, the cormorant, the swan, the heron, the gier-eagle, the lapwing, the bat, de All these and more are mentioned in Scripture, and most of them are alluded to in its poetry. city, we may search other literatures in vain. reality is this, but the unconsciousness for We find this in their selection of topics. Sub- which we would contend? When we say that jects exceedingly delicate, and, to fastidious men of genius, in their highest moods, are civilization, offensive, are occasionally alluded unconscious, we mean, not that these men beto with a plainness of speech springing from come the mere tubes through which a foreign perfect innocence of intention. The language influence descends, but that certain lofty of Scripture, like the finger of the sun, touches emotions or ideas so fill and possess them, as uncleanness, and remains pure. "Who can to produce temporary forgetfulness of themtouch pitch, and not be defiled?" The quiet, selves, except as the passive though intelligent holy hand of a Moses or an Ezekiel can. The instruments of the feeling or the thought. It proof is, that none of the descriptions they is true, that afterwards self may suggest the give us of sin have ever inflamed the most in- | reflection-"the fact that we have been flammable imagination. Men read the 20th chapter of Leviticus, and the 23d of Ezekiel, precisely as they witness the unwitting actions of a child; nay, they feel their moral sense strengthened and purified by such passages. The Jewish writers manifest this simplicity, too, in the extreme width and homeliness of their imagery. They draw their images from all that interests man, or that bears the faintest reflection of the face of God. The willow by the watercourses, and the cedar on Lebanon -the coney and the leviathan-the widow's cruse of oil, and Sinai's fiery summit-the sower overtaking the reaper, and God coming from Teman and from Paran-Jael's tent-nail, and Elijah's fiery chariot-boys and girls playing in the streets of Jerusalem, and those angels that are spirits, and those ministers that are flames of fire; yea, meaner objects than any of these are selected impartially to illustrate the great truths which are the subjects of their song. The path of every true poet should be the path of the sun-rays, which, secure in their own purity and directness, pass fearlessly through all deep, dark, intricate, or unholy places-equally illustrate the crest of a serpent and the wing of a bird-pause on the summit of an ant-hillock, as on the brow of Mont Blanc-take up as a "little thing" alike the crater and the shed tress of the pine -and after they have, in one wide charity, embraced all shaped and sentient things, expend their waste strength and beauty upon the inane space beyond. Thus does the imagination of the Hebrew bard count no subject too low, and none too high, for its comprehensive and incontrollable sweep. Unconsciousness we hold to be the highest style of simplicity and of genius. It has been said, indeed, by a high authority (the late John Sterling), that men of genius are conscious, not of what is peculiar in the individual, but of what is universal in the race; of what characterizes not a man, but Man-not of their own individual genius, but of God, as moving within their minds. Yet, what in selected to receive and convey such melodies proves our breadth and fitness; it is from the oak, not the reed, that the wind elicits its deepest music." But, first, this thought never takes place at the same time with the true afflatus, and is almost inconsistent with its presence. It is a mere after inference; an inference, secondly, which is not always made; nay, thirdly, an inference which is often rejected, when the poet off the stool feels tempted to regard with suspicion or shuddering disgust the results of his raptured hour of inspiration. Milton seems to have shrunk back at the retrospect of the height he had reached in the "Paradise Lost," and preferred his "Paradise Regained." Shakspeare, on the other hand, having wrought his tragic miracles, under a more entire self-abandonment, becomes, in his sonnets, owing to a reflex act of sagacity, aware of what feats he had done. Bunyan is carried on through all the stages of his immortal Pilgrimage like a child in the leading-strings of his nurse; but, after looking back upon its completed course, begins, with all the harmless vanity of a child (see his prefatory poem to the second part), to crow over the achievement. Thus all gifted spirits do best when they "know not what they do." The boy Tell "was great, nor knew how great he was. But, if this be true of men of genius, it is still more characteristic of the Bards of the Bible; for they possess perfect passive reception in the moment of their utterance, and have given no symptoms of that after self-satisfaction which it were hard to call, and harder to distinguish from, literary vanity. We shudder at the thought of Isaiah weighing his "burdens" over against the odes of Deborah or David; or of Ezekiel measuring his intellectual stature with that of Daniel. Like many evening rivers of different bulks and channels, but descending from one chain of mountains, swollen by one rain, and meeting in one valley, do those mighty Prophets lift up their unequal, unemulous, unconscious, but harmonious and heaven-seeking voices. We notice next the boldness, which is not | and, under the mask of fiction, have taken the inferior to the beauty of their speech. They opportunity of venting their spleen or personal use liberties, and dare darings, which make us disgust in the face of God. Without entering tremble. One is reminded, while reading on the great enigma of the "Faust,” we questheir words, of the unhinged intellect of the tion much if the effect of its opening scenes in aged King of England, loosened from all law, heaven be not to produce a very pernicious delivered from all fear, having cast off every feeling. Byron, again, at one time stands in weight of custom, conventionalism, and the august presence-chamber, like a sulky, reason, ranging at large, a fire-winged energy, speechless fiend, and, at another, asks small free of the universe, exposing all the abuses of uneasy questions, like an ill-conditioned child. society, and asking strange and unbidden Dante and Milton alone, on this high platquestions at the Deity himself. Thus, not in form, unite a thorough consciousness of themfrenzy, but in the height of the privilege of selves, with a profound reverence for Him in their peculiar power, do the Hebrew Prophets whose presence they stand; they bend before, often turn their argument and expostulation but do not shrivel up in his sight; they come up from earth to heaven-from Man to God. slowly and softly, but do not steal into his Hear the words of Jeremiah-"O the Hope of presence. We must not stop to do more than Israel, the Saviour thereof in time of trouble, allude to those modern caricaturists of Milton why shouldst thou be as a stranger in the land, and Byron, who, in the guise of vast pietism, and as a wayfaring man, that turneth aside to display a self-ignorance and self-conceit which tarry for a night? Why shouldst thou be as a are almost blasphemy, and who, as their man astonied, as a mighty man that cannot plumes vaingloriously bristle up and broaden save? Do not abhor us, for thy name's sake. in the eye of Deity, and as their harsh ambiDo not disgrace the throne of thy glory." Or tious scream rises in his ear, present a spechear Job-"I know now that God hath over- tacle which we know not whether to call more thrown me, and hath compassed me with his ludicrous or more horrible. net. Behold I cry out of wrong, but I am not heard. I cry aloud, but there is no judgment. Why do ye persecute me as God, and are not satisfied with my flesh?" Or listen to Jonah's irony, thrown up in the very nostrils of Jehovah "I knew that thou art a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repentest thee of the evil; therefore, now, O Lord, take, I beseech thee, my life from me." These expressions, amid many similar, suggest the memory of those sublimest of uninspired words "Ye heavens, If ye do love old men, if your sweet sway Surely, there is in such words no irreverence or blasphemy. Nay, on those moments, when prayer and prophecy transcend themselves, when the divine within, by the agony of its earnestness, is stung up almost to the measure and the stature of the divine above-when the Soul rises in its majestic wrath, like "thunder heard remote"-is it not then that men have reached all but the highest point of elevation possible to them on earth, and felt as if they saw "God face to face, nor yet were blasted by his brow?" Very different, however, this spirit from that of some modern poets, who have "rushed in where angels fear to tread," But the boldness of the Hebrew Bards, which we panegyrize, extends to more than their expressions of religious emotion-it extends to all their sentiment, to their style, and to their bearing. "They know not to give flattering titles; in so doing," they feel "that their Maker would soon take them away." With God vertical over their head in all their motions, miserable courtiers and sycophants they would have made, even if such base avenues to success had been always open before them. They are the stern rebukers of wickedness in high places, the unhired advocates of the oppressed and the poor; and fully do they purchase a title to the charge of being "troublers of Israel," disturbing it as the hurricane the elements and haunts of the pestilence. All classes, from the King of Samaria to the drunkard of Ephraim—from the Babylonian Lucifer, son of the morning, to the meanest, mincing, and wanton-eyed daughter of Zion, with her round tire, like the moon-kings, priests, peasantry, goldsmiths, and carpenters-men and women, countrymen and foreigners, must listen and tremble, when they smite with their hand and stamp with their foot. In them the moral conscience of the people found an incarnation, and stood at the corner of every street, to deplore degene racy, to expose imposture, to blast the pretences and the minions of despotism, to denounce every kind and degree of sin, and to point with a finger which never shook, to the unrepealed code of Moses, and to the law written on the fleshly tablets of the heart, as the standards of rectitude. Where, in modern ages, can we find a class exerting or aspiring to such a province and such a power? Individuals of prophetic mood we have had. We have had a Milton, "wasting his life" in loud or silent protest against that age of "evil days and evil tongues" on which he had fallen. We have had a Cowper, lifting up "Expostulations," not unheard, to his degraded country. We have had an Edward Irving, his "neck clothed with thunder," and his loins girt with the "spirit and the power of Elias," pealing out harsh truth, till he sank down, wearied and silent in death. But we have not, and never have had, a class anointed and consecrated by the hand of God to the utterance of eternal truth, as immediately taught them from behind and above-speaking, moving, looking, gesticulating, and acting, "as they were moved by the Holy Ghost." Our poets have, in general, been beautiful reflectors of the Beautiful, elegant and tuneful minstrels, that could play well on an instrument, and that were to the world as a "very lovely song," -what else our Rogerses and Moores?-not men persecuted and chased into action and utterance, by the apparition behind them of the True. Our statesmen, as a class, have been cold temporizers, mistaking craft for wisdom, success for merit, and the putting off the evil day for success. Our mental philosophers have done little else than translate into ingenious jargon the eldest sentiments and intuitive knowledge of humanity-they have taught men to lisp of the Infinite by new methods, and to babble of the Eternal in terms elaborately and artistically feeble. Our preachers, as a body, have been barely faithful to their brief, and they have found that brief in the compass of a creed, rather than in the pages of the Bible. But our prophets, where are they? Where many who resemble those wild, wandering, but holy flames of fire, which once ran along the highways, the hills, and the market-places of Palestine? Instead, what find we? For the most part, an assortment of all varieties of scribbling, scheming, speculating, and preaching machines, the most active of whose movements form the strongest antithesis to true life. Even the prophetseeming men among us display rather the mood than the insight of prophecy-rather its fire than its light, and rather its fury than its fire-rather a yearning after, than a feeling of, the stoop of the descending God. We are 2D SERIES, VOL. II. compelled to take the complaint of the ancient seer, with a yet bitterer feeling than his"Our signs we do not now behold: There is not us among A prophet more, nor any one That knows the time how long." And we must even return, and sit at the feet of those bards of Israel, who, apart from their supernatural pretensions-as teachers, as poets, as truthful and earnest men-stand as yet alone, unsurmounted and unapproached-the Himalayan Mountains of mankind. PALINGEN ESIS. BY H. W. LONGFELLOW. I lay upon the headland height, and listened To the incessant sobbing of the sea In caverns under me, And watched the waves, that tossed and fled and glistened, Until the rolling meadows of amethyst Melted away in mist. Then suddenly, as one from sleep, I started; For round about me all the sunny capes Seemed peopled with the shapes Of those whom I had known in days departed, Apparelled in the loveliness which gleams On faces seen in dreams. A moment only, and the light and glory And the wild roses of the promontory There was an old belief that in the embers Of all things their primordial form exists, And cunning alchemists Could recreate the rose with all its members From its own ashes, but without the bloom, Without the lost perfume. Ah me! what wonder-working, occult science What craft of alchemy can bid defiance "O, give me back!" I cried, "the vanished splendours, The breath of morn, and the exultant strife, When the swift stream of life Eounds o'er its rocky channel, and surrenders The pond, with all its lilies, for the leap Into the unknown deep!" 128 And the sea answered, with a lamentation, It breathes no more, its heart has no pulsation; Then said I, "From its consecrated cerements But, still remembering all the lost endearments, Into what land of harvests, what plantations Bright with autumnal foliage and the glow Of sunsets burning low; Beneath what midnight skies, whose constellations Light up the spacious avenues between This world and the unseen! Amid what friendly greetings and caresses, To what temptations in lone wildernesses, I do not know; nor will I vainly question But without rash conjecture or suggestion STORY OF TWO HIGHLANDERS. BY JAMES HOGG. On the banks of the Albany River, which falls into Hudson's Bay, there is, amongst others, a small colony settled, which is mostly made up of emigrants from the Highlands of Scotland. Though the soil of the valleys contiguous to the river is exceedingly rich and fertile, yet the winter being so long and severe, these people do not labour too incessantly in agriculture, but depend for the most part upon their skill in hunting and fishing for their subsistence there being commonly abundance of both game and fish. Two young kinsmen, both Macdonalds, went out one day into these boundless woods to hunt, each of them armed with a well-charged gun in his hand, and a skene-dhu, or Highland dirk, by his side. They shaped their course towards a small stream, which descends from the mountains to the north-west of the river, on the banks of which they knew there were still a few wild swine remaining; and of all other creatures they wished most to meet with one of them, little doubting but that they would overcome even a pair of them, if chance would direct them to their lurking-places, though they were reported to be so remarkable both for their strength and ferocity. They were not at all successful, having neglected the common game in searching for these animals; and a little before sunset they returned homeward, without having shot anything save one wild turkey. But when they least expected it, to their infinite joy they discovered a deep pit or cavern, which contained a large litter of fine half-grown pigs, and none of the old ones with them. This was a prize indeed; so, without losing a moment, Donald said to the other, Mack, you pe te littlest man-creep you in and durk te little sows, and I'll pe keeping vatch at te door." Mack complied without hesitation, gave his gun to Donald, unsheathed his skene-dhu, and crept into the cave head foremost; but after he was all out of sight, save the brogues, he stopped short, and called back, "But Lord, Tonald, pe sure to keep out te ould ones. Tont you pe fearing tat, man," said Donald. The cave was deep, but there was abundance of room in the further end, where Mack, with his sharp skene-dhu, now commenced the work of death. He was scarcely well begun, when Donald perceived a monstrous wild boar advancing upon him, roaring, and grinding his tusks, while the fire of rage gleamed from his eyes. Donald said not a word for fear of alarming his friend; besides, the savage was so hard upon him ere he was aware, he scarcely had time for anything: so setting himself firm, and cocking his gun, he took his aim; but, that the shot might prove the more certain death, he suffered the boar to come within a few paces of him before he ventured to fire; he at last drew the fatal trigger, expecting to blow out his eyes, brains and all. Merciful Heaven-the gun missed fire, or flashed in the pan, I am not sure which. There was no time to lose-Donald dashed the piece in the animal's face, turned his back, and fled with precipitation. The boar pursued him only for a short space, for having heard the cries of his suffering young ones as he passed the mouth of the den, he hasted back to their rescue. Most men would have given all up for lost. It was not so with Donald-Mack's life was at stake. As soon as he observed the monster return from pursuing him, Donald faced about, and pursued |